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State of the Edit 2013

LOS ANGELES
-- This year’s “State of
the Edit” opinion
survey of NLE representatives
revealed
a post production
community that is aggressively
tackling the
challenges arising from
rapidly evolving digital
production technology.

“It’s fascinating to see how mobile
apps like Vine and FrameBlast are making
people think differently about how
they communicate,” Mooney said, “causing
more people than ever to consider what it
means to edit video creatively. If this makes
more people want to become filmmakers,
then that’s tremendously exciting.

“At the other end of the spectrum,
4K production is becoming the norm,”
Mooney said. “It was incredible to
note how many Sundance films were shot
on 4K, and with more cinemas projecting
4K and the onslaught of consumer 4KTV
sets, this will only get bigger. That, coupled
with other blossoming technologies
like HDR and HFR, offers creative people
a richer palette than ever before.”

Maurice Patel, Autodesk

STAND OUT IN THE CROWD
Online consumption of video is changing
our industry’s perspective for Maurice
Patel, entertainment industry manager at
Autodesk. “People watching programming
on YouTube, social media or OTT at home
has increased dramatically over the past
year,” Patel said. “For editors this means
there is a lot more video to be created,
which means it’s key for them to find a
way to stand out from the crowd. Increasingly
we have a positive feedback loop
where the more engaging the content, the
longer people will watch the video. This
competition accelerates the ‘democratization’
of editing, giving rise to the ‘preditor’
(producer/editor) whose
job is to tell a good story
and make it look good.”

This kind of expanded
opportunity for editors is
also going to call for greater
collaboration among
all members of a production
team. “We are starting
to see calls for simplification
of tools, such as color
correction, that can be
shared through the cloud,” said Dave
Colantuoni
senior director
of product
management,
broadcast
storage and
editing at
Avid. “Delays
cost money, so
we need the
production pipeline to move faster and
be accessible from all of the workstations
in the workflow. But in order for this to
be practical, concerns over maintaining
security of the content have to be dealt
with. So we feel a flexible approach using
a private cloud will insure that only those
with proper permissions can access the
material.”

Al Mooney, Adobe

The two big issues that Andy Liebman,
CEO of Editshare, sees facing editors are
the proliferation of codecs and the increasing
need for flexible backups. “It’s gotten
past confusing and
people just want
to access their media
and be able to
edit it, so NLE’s are
constantly upgrading
their library of
codecs,” Liebman
said. “In addition,
file-based production
means we can
no longer rely on
archived source
tapes as a backup
so digital asset management and offsite
storage have become an essential part of a
professional workflow.”

MORE THAN JUST EDITING
For some, post production systems are
becoming more multipurpose. “These days,
the concept of ‘editing’ is just about 12 light-years wide,” said Ed Casaccia, senior director
of segment marketing at Grass Valley,
“yet full-functioned edit systems have come
down to a price level everyone can afford.
There is a dynamic between ease of use
and feature richness that has to be reconciled in the user interface. If you look at
the range of applications, you have home
movies on one end and digital cinema at
the other, and a successful NLE needs to
be designed at a price point where one
size fits all in today’s market. The number
of production houses and movie studios
is limited, but the market for edit systems
that let people intuitively move pictures
around is exploding.”

Dave Colantuoni, Avid

What distinguishes editing in 2013
from editing in 2003 is the rising expectations
we have for the role of the editor
according to Boris Yamnitsky, president
of Boris FX/Media 100. “Editors today are
counted on to make the final product appear
better than the source material,” he
said. “It’s not so much about the way material
is shot, it’s more about what ‘look’
the editor can give to it. We see this a lot
in broadcast graphics, which increasingly
is the domain of the NLE rather than
standalone systems. Compositing, format
transcoding, video filters and color correction
all come under the responsibility
of today’s editors, making edit systems the
final hub combining all the aspects of a
video production.”

But are we going to be prepared when
new high resolution/frame rate formats
force us to re-evaluate our concept of
storage requirement? As Steve Owen,
marketing director at Quantel, points out,
“The move from HD to 4K and even Ultra
HD is relatively small,” Owen said,
“but high dynamic range and high frame
rates are going to put a lot of pressure on
us. Consider that 18 terabytes of storage
will hold 25 hours of high-definition, but
only 100 minutes of Ultra HD at 60 fps
and 16-bit color depth. However, NHK Science
& Technical Research Laboratories
are already proposing 8K at 120 fps for
their Super Hi-Vision format. Now that 18
same TB can hold less than 10 minutes capacity.”

Boris Yamnitsky, Boris FX/Media 100

But Owen has faith that technological
evolution will come to the rescue. “Companies
like NVIDIA are working wonders
developing faster GPU processing power
and improved codecs are coming down
the pike from several sources. So with
good pipes and optimized software, we
will continue to be able to provide
viewers with really, really good pictures.”

Sony is at the forefront of this movement,
having recently released both 4K
cameras and their new XAVC codec
based on level 5.2 of H.264/MPEG-4
AVC. “Our Vegas Pro v12 was the first
NLE to be able to handle the XAVC format
in HD, 2K and 4K,” said Leigh Herman,
director of business development at Sony
Creative Software. “But one of the trends we
are seeing is the need for editors to become
proficient on multiple systems so they can
edit on Windows, Mac or Linux platforms.
More choices for editing in native file formats
brings with it greater complexity but
also increased opportunities.”